


and I know she reached my heart (in thin air)

by janie_tangerine



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: ADWD spoilers, Anal Sex, Awkward Sexual Situations, F/M, I Don't Even Know, Oral Sex, Past Abuse, Post - A Dance With Dragons, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, also there's some ADWD headcanon in here so thread carefully, damaged people trying to have a somewhat healthy relationship, more or less, triggers everywhere probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 01:02:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/janie_tangerine/pseuds/janie_tangerine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It’s been three years since they escaped, and one since Jeyne kissed him, and six months since he touched her while they were sharing a bed.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	and I know she reached my heart (in thin air)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for my lovely friend [inthekeyofd](http://inthekeyofd.livejournal.com/) on LJ who (a long time ago, oooops) asked me if I could write her some not-overly-horribly-angsty Theon/Jeyne P. I usually ship these two more platonically than romantically but I thought I'd give it a go and it ended up going from there to... well, 'how-I-think-that-things-would-go-if-they-actually-did-something-more-than-kissing', and apparently this happened. Hopefully it works. ;) The title is from a Pearl Jam song, I don't own them, everything is pure speculation.

It’s been three years since they jumped from Winterfell’s roof during a snowstorm, and sometimes it feels like it’s been ten. Other times, it feels like it’s been three days. He never asks Jeyne if she ever feels the same about it, mostly because he isn’t sure he wants to know. Not that she ever asks him either, which is only a good thing – he’s told what happened to him out loud exactly once, to his sister, and he doesn’t plan on ever doing it again. It was bad enough that one time and it’s bad enough that three years, a set of false teeth, a kingsmoot, a new Stark in Winterfell and two dead Boltons later he ‘s still thinking about it even if he wishes he could just _stop_. Then again, he isn’t sure that’s ever going to happen, but he’s learned to appreciate what he has. Mostly, that no one is out to kill him, that his sister is more of a good diplomat that he ever gave her credit for, that Sansa Stark cared about her former best friend’s well-being enough not to have him executed the moment she was back in Winterfell and that they’re being left well-enough alone. (Having proof that he hadn’t really killed the Stark children when Lord Manderly showed up with Rickon Stark and the smuggler who retrieved him from Skaagos did matter. At least. Not that he doesn’t regret having ever faked _that_ first thing in the morning, every morning.)

It doesn’t help that it’s been three years and he can’t look at himself in a mirror for more than the necessary time it takes for shaving. Oh, it got easier with time – at the beginning he didn’t even try to do that himself – but while Jeyne looks _well_ now, he isn’t sure he ever will. He put on weight, sure, and after he started eating decently and had his head shaved, his hair grew back not as dark as it used to be, but close enough – he keeps it shorter now than he used to, though. His sister found him some maester with a set of fake silver teeth and at least he doesn’t feel like he always has to keep his mouth shut anymore. But it doesn’t change that he can’t grow back his fingers, or that he still has lines on his face that no one who hasn’t reached thirty should have, or that he could count on two hands the nights of decent sleep he’s had since then. Or that saying that you have to remember your name is easier than actually doing it, even if he hasn’t slipped for months, in that sense.

There’s the part where he spent a good length of time wondering _why_ Jeyne didn’t just go back to Winterfell – Sansa has been more than clear when she said that she was welcome any time, and Jeyne sometimes goes and spends a week or two there, but she always comes back. At the beginning, well – he understood it. The moment they finally had some peace, it just made sense that she’d want to stay with the only other person who knew what she had been through, and the reverse had been valid for him. They slept in two separate beds, back then, and if any of them was woken up by the other screaming, whoever it was would wake the other up and go back to their own bed – the one time they tried sleeping in the same one, he had accidentally thrown an arm around her waist and the moment she tensed, he was on his feet and outside the door retching. Ramsay Bolton’s wedding night is, something he never wants to even think about, but just having her that near was enough to go there and they had agreed that sleeping together was a bad idea. For the moment, at least. But they would touch during the day – nowhere below the waist. Sometimes she’d come next to him and hold his hand, other times he’d put an arm around her and draw her close, enough that after months they felt comfortable enough to actually share the bed. Sleeping on very opposite sides and not touching, but still, it was nice to know that someone was there within arm’s reach.

There’s also the time when it had been two years since their escape and he had actually asked her. She could do better than that, she could take up on Sansa’s offer – he could manage on his own. After all, his sister still manages to check on him to see whether he hasn’t killed himself once each month, even if she’s ruling over the Iron Islands now and she has more important things to do. He didn’t really need more company than that. And she could visit if she wanted – Winterfell is mere hours from here. And then Jeyne shook her head and kissed his cheek and said that she wasn’t interested in doing better even if she couldn’t go farther than _that_. And he had been left speechless. He hadn’t expected that, and he hadn’t even known what to say – far cry from the good old times when his first reaction would have been taking off her shirt.

He had spent a whole lot of time trying to figure it out. On one side, he knew perfectly that if they – if they – _if they_ , it would be all kinds of wrong. He hadn’t even known how she could ever want to be with him in that sense, but the point was that the idea didn’t entirely feel as wrong as it should have. Or at least, if he thought about being with her _that_ way, the first thing coming to mind wasn’t the wedding night – it was feeling her cling to him as they flew from the rails. It had ended with him telling Jeyne that he was nowhere near close to being able to go there, but that didn’t mean that it couldn’t change. Given enough time, but somehow he was sure that she wasn’t in any hurry to rush things. He was right on that account.

It took him one month to work up the force of will to kiss her, and at the last second he moved so that instead of her lips, he kissed the corner of her mouth. He hadn’t known what to expect, but not for her arm to go around his waist, her hand shaking as it palmed the small of his back, and then for her to tell him that it had felt like a song.

Theon never really was the material for songs, and he sure as the seven hells isn’t now, but it had still felt… good to hear it. Not that it changed much, but he felt marginally more sure of what the hell he was attempting to do there.

Then there’s the part when the first time they kissed more or less for real, she was the one starting it. His old self would have recoiled at the thought, but really, he’s glad that Jeyne took the initiative because he isn’t sure he would have ever done that. It wasn’t even much of a kiss, just her walking up to him one morning, taking a breath and pressing her mouth against his, but at least one between the two of them _did_ it, and after that – after that, it wasn’t so hard to think about what it could mean. Fine, they wouldn’t have even crossed paths again if it wasn’t for bad luck (in her case) and complete idiocy (in his; these days, the more he thinks about what brought him to a cell in the Dreadfort, the more he can’t understand how stupid, reckless and blind he had been). But they can’t undo it (she can’t get back the two years of her life she spent in a brothel before being passed for Arya Stark, and he can’t go back to Robb’s army, can he, even if it’s the only place he should have been), and no one else will ever understand him the way she does and vice versa, and so what if they try to gain at least something good out of it?

At least he’s the first who crossed the bridge when it comes to touching in the bed. Not that he did anything more than putting a hand on her hip, but when his first instinct wasn’t recoiling and hers wasn’t flinching, he figured that it was good enough.

It’s been three years since they escaped, and one since Jeyne kissed him, and six months since he touched her while they were sharing a bed.

They talked about it. More or less. Meaning, neither of them mentioned any of the previous times they shared a bed and didn’t just sleep in it, but they both agreed that they wanted to try, just not right in that moment, and the almost hilarious thing is that he has been the one delaying it. Jeyne had said she could have tried at least three months ago. She said that she was sure of it, and it had been long enough, and she thought she could do it, but he had been the one asking her to wait. Years ago, he’d have never thought he’d ever be the one to say it. But thankfully for Jeyne, there are things she wasn’t there for. He never told her what happened before she was brought to Winterfell and he never will if he can help it, but that’s exactly the point. She doesn’t know that he had tasted the same medicine Ramsay Bolton gave her from long before the wedding night. His problem wasn’t being intimate with _her_ , not entirely. It wasn’t that he wouldn’t know what to do – once upon a time, he wasn’t a gentleman by any mean, but it doesn’t mean he can’t remember how to please a woman. But he hadn’t wanted to risk starting things just to find himself thinking about other times that weren’t Jeyne’s wedding night.

And now he’s letting her take off his shirt and thinking that he should just stop worrying. He saved her life once and it took every bit of bravery he could muster to throw himself off a roof with Jeyne clinging to him, he went through things that he wouldn’t have wished on his worst enemy and he still managed not to die. They both want it, and it doesn’t matter if most times he thinks that he doesn’t deserve it – it’s been long enough to at least give it a try.

Also, until it’s just his shirt being taken off, there’s not much to worry about. His chest is scarred all over, you don’t get flayed multiple times and then heal so that it doesn’t show, but at least it’s – not entirely horrible. It’s just scars, old ones, and none of them looks red or angry. It’s the rest that he isn’t sure he can go through as easily.

“Can that wait?” he asks, thankful that her hands don’t automatically go to his laces.

She looks up at him, her cheeks slightly pink. “Of course. But – if you don’t–”

“It’s – it’s not – it’s fine. For now.”

She looks confused for a moment, and she would – it’s not like she hasn’t seen him naked a handful of times, and she knows that he could fuck her if he wanted to. But it was always night, and never up close. She doesn’t know that while he could do that, he isn’t sure he wants to. He isn’t even sure he wants her to see up close that when he was flayed, his groin wasn’t spared either. There are still red, angry scars all over his thighs and just under his stomach, not to mention that his foreskin is gone, and – and he isn’t even sure he’d find any pleasure in it. No. For now he’s not going there. Not yet.

“Really,” he tries to reassure her, and he isn’t sure he sounds reassuring at all. “There’s no need.”

She doesn’t seem too convinced, but she doesn’t argue and he’s thankful for it. He sighs, bringing up his right hand to the back of her head, marveling at the fact that she doesn’t even tense when his lips meet hers. He puts his other hand on her hip, gasping into her mouth when her fingers brush over the ones he has left, and he doesn’t know they’re standing against the bed until the back of his knees hits its side. He stops at that point – he isn’t sure about how he wants for it to go, but he knows that he can’t have someone on top of him or worse, behind him. And he isn’t too sure about her, but he can bet that she wouldn’t like for him to be above her either.

Maybe he should just stop thinking so hard, but it’s the first time since – _since_ , for the both of them, and he doesn’t want it to go horribly wrong. (Something going wrong, he has already taken into account.)

So when she sits on the bed he doesn’t join her. He tries not to think about the wedding night because he really should not, and then he drops softly to his knees – he wishes he could go faster, but he can’t. Damn his feet.

She breathes in when he brings his hands under her skirt and pulls it up, and she doesn’t say no. Maybe because the position is completely different. Maybe because she knows that as they are, she could push him away in a second if she wanted to. He doesn’t know and it’s not as if it matters. What matters is a lot of things. First, that he’s perfectly aware that Jeyne hasn’t probably done this willingly with anyone in her life, which makes him feel even less qualified for the task – once upon a time he’d have made it good for her, he’d have known how without even needing to think about it, but he isn’t that person anymore. Second, that he can’t remember the last person he actually _liked_ being with – it’s as if the last years completely made him forget everyone he’s bedded. Except – except a certain someone, of course, but that wasn’t a question of bedding someone willingly.

Fuck, no.

He still thinks that Jeyne deserves better than him. He might be better off now, but he doesn’t fool himself thinking that he’ll ever be _fine_ again, and she knows that. But apparently they’re both on the same page here, regardless of how they got there because right now, as he slowly, carefully pulls down her smallclothes, pushing them over her legs until they reach their bare feet (his aren’t) and then the ground, he can’t even remember how that happened. Her skin is soft as he kisses the side of her knee, his fingers reaching for her hips. It’s just to keep himself steady, though – he doesn’t even attempt to make his grip anything more than very loose. He isn’t even sure he has the strength to do that anyway. Her fingers touch his shoulders, barely brushing, as if she doesn’t know if she should push forward or not. It’s probably better that she doesn’t, he doesn’t know how he’d react to it, but he gets the hint. He can stop stalling. If she wants to stop she knows she only has to say it.

So he moves his head forward. He dreads the moment for a second, unable to avoid thinking about the first time (when – well. She had been dry. He would have known that), but when he presses his mouth tentatively to the soft pink flesh between her legs, it’s – entirely different. She’s wet already (not overtly so, but she _is_ ) and he doesn’t expect the shiver going through his spine the moment he finds out. And it gives him the necessary push – he realizes that he hadn’t entirely believed that she might want this with him until he saw the proof right in front of him, and that’s more than good enough.

 _You knew how to do this once,_ he thinks, _you might as well try to remember that, too._

She lets out a small, strangled moan when he starts using his tongue, slowly, just on the outer side for the moment. It’s also not at all similar to any other sound she heard coming from her mouth whenever – _whenever_ , so he stops thinking about that and decides that he’s done holding back. He moves upward, running his tongue over her clit, and he doesn’t know he manages not to scram back when she thrusts her hips forward as she whimpers from somewhere above him, just because he hadn’t expected it. But for some reason that escapes him he manages not to (and good, because that’d have ruined it, wouldn’t it?) and – well. Either she really doesn’t know any better or he hasn’t lost his touch, in spite of everything.

Or maybe it’s both.

Not the issue. He moves back a bit, bites at the inside of her thigh, careful to keep it slow (and still marveling at the fact that he can do it without feeling gaps – the wonders of having your mouth filled with silver) and then moves his right hand down from her hip. He doesn’t flinch when her fingers start digging at his shoulder the moment he leans forward again and puts his mouth on her clit again, and he’s expecting it when her hips jerk towards him the moment he starts sliding one finger inside her. (She hadn’t expected it, he knows from the way she had moaned, but it still sounded good to his hears.) He keeps on pressing his lips over the inside of her thigh as he adds a second finger, and he’s so focused on trying to do it right that he doesn’t really concentrate on what she’s saying. He realizes that she’s saying his name all over when he has both fingers inside her, as far as he can let them be, and then her other hand is buried in the hair at the back of his head, not pushing but not pulling away either. He’s almost marveling at that, at how she’s arching into his touch as she tells him not to stop.

Well then. He won’t. He bends his fingers, feeling that she’s close, and in another life he’d have moved away, but not in this one. He moves away enough that he can look up and see Jeyne’s face – her hair is falling all over it like a curtain, but he can see her slightly parted lips and her flushed cheeks, and – fuck, it’s not like he wasn’t enjoying what they’re doing, far from it, but he’s learned not to think about what happens under his belt, and the moment he realizes that he’s rock hard… well, _that_ almost makes him scram, but he can’t do that when Jeyne is clenching around his fingers and saying his name and gripping at his shoulder as if she’d die if she let go. And as it is, he doesn’t even feel the need to use his free hand to touch himself – he doesn’t need that, not when she’s coming apart in front of him, _because_ of him. There’s wetness all over his hand when she unclenches and he can move it away, and the sight almost makes him feel dizzy. He can hear her taking long, deep breaths, as if she’s run out of air, and – he doesn’t even know why instead of standing up and finding a corner to get himself off (because he’s not going to make her do it – fuck, no, she doesn’t need to see him down there) he moves his head forward again and puts his tongue on her again, licking her clean, and he knows from the way her grip loosens that she hadn’t been expecting it.

There’s a fleeting thought telling him that he should be worried, that he shouldn’t find doing _this_ more pleasurable or urgent than taking care of his own needs, but he dismisses it. He’s more surprised that they got this far and that nothing horrible happened in between, and he already knew that what months of Dreadfort broke isn’t been completely fixed and maybe it’s never going to be. But it’s fine. It’s enough that this is making him feel good, it really is, and he knows that he must be flushing when he moves away for good. He can’t avoid it when his first instinct is looking down at the ground, but then he shakes his head and raises it up. He’s thankful that Jeyne didn’t pull on his hair or anything of the sort. He doesn’t know what to expect at that point (her hair brushing over his brow was one though – her head is still bent down), but it isn’t her lips curved up in a sweet, sated smile. Jeyne’s cheeks are a deep pink, it’s obvious that at some point she bit down on her bottom lip, and her eyes are more pupil than brown, and he can barely believe that he put that expression on her face.

“Was – that was good, then?” he stammers, realizing that he doesn’t remember how this goes – fuck, he used to just leave, one life ago. Definitely more convenient.

She looks at him as if she can’t even believe what he just asked. “ _Good_? That’s – that’s underestimating it. Wow. I hadn’t – I hadn’t thought it could be like _that_. You know?”

He knows. He knows indeed.

He also knows what he’s about to do. He’s going to stand up, he’s going to kiss her and then he’s going to find that corner for himself, and –

He hadn’t taken his feet into account. Sometimes he tends to forget that they aren’t whole anymore. The moment he puts the first one the wrong way, he completely loses balance while he’s also leaning forward, and the next thing he knows, Jeyne has dragged him on top of her before he falls down to the ground rather unceremoniously.

His first thought is _why hasn’t she pushed me away yet?_

Then he figures that since she was the one pulling him towards her maybe it makes sense. He doesn’t know. He isn’t even sure he wants to think about it.

And then she blushes, her cheeks going even redder, and –

Well. Right. His hard-on is pressing against her thigh – obviously.

“I’m – apologies. I’ll – I’ll just go to the kitchen and take care of it.”

Her hold on his wrists tightens. “What – why? I thought – I mean – I just assumed that we would – well, that’s what happens, right?”

Right. Of course. And that’s why he won’t do it, among the rest. He doesn’t want her to feel as if she owes him.

“I don’t – there’s really no need.”

And then he realizes that he said it wrong, because she looks slightly hurt now, and she’s still not letting him go – and he doesn’t really have a chance. It’s ridiculous that out of the two of them she’s the one that could pin him down, but what can he do.

“I thought – I thought you wanted me?”

Oh. _Oh_.

He’s an idiot.

“And I thought I made it very clear,” he whispers.

“Then – then why? It’s because _he_ –”

“No! No, gods, that’s not it. Jeyne, it’s – it’s me, not you.”

Now she looks just baffled. “Theon.”

Damn, she knows him too well. The moment she says his name, he looks up at her, and she knew he’d do it. “Jeyne.”

“ _How_ is that you? I – uh, it doesn’t seem to me like _you_ might have a problem.”

“It’s – it’s not that. I _could_. But – I don’t – I didn’t even know I was hard until it was almost over. And I just – maybe in a while. Not now.”

He knows that he hasn’t exactly cleared up the issue, but he’s still looking at her and when her eyes widen he hopes that she understood it. She may not know the extent of what had been going on before she was brought to Winterfell, but in her position it wouldn’t have been hard to guess.

And then she gives him a short, curt nod and he lets out a breath of relief. Good. She understood.

But she still isn’t letting him go.

“All right,” she says, her voice slightly wavering. “I mean, I’m not even sure that I’d have managed to go through it, if we – if we fucked.” The moment she blushes when she says the word he feels thankful enough to weep. If she can still blush while saying _fuck_ maybe one of them still has some hope left. “But – I mean, you made it good for me, I don’t want you to just – go off to take care of it. I can always –” she reaches out with her hand, towards his laces, and he shakes his head so quickly that she looks almost taken aback.

“No. I mean – you could, I guess, but – it’s not – he didn’t leave that alone.”

Not that at this point he needs his time anymore – this conversation has made him a lot less hard than he was five minutes ago. “It’s – it’s fine, I guess, but it’s not pretty, and you didn’t have to see it until now, and I’m not so sure –”

“Theon.”

He stops at once.

“I’m not – if you don’t want me to it’s fine. But this isn’t – the way I thought of it – it has to be the both of us.”

“Believe me, what we were doing before? That – that was enough. Really. I don’t need more than that.”

She shakes her head, her nails almost digging into the skin around his wrists. “No. I’m not sure what you’re even thinking, but if we stop here, I’ll just feel like this was just about me, and – it shouldn’t be. There has to be _something_ that I can do.”

That’s the point – he never wanted it to be about him. He doesn’t – that’s not in the cards, or at least it wasn’t until a moment ago. But now – he doesn’t really want to disappoint her, and there’s a part of him urging him to let her do _anything_ because it’s been so long and Jeyne wants to do it for him for some reason and –

He takes a breath and gives her a curt nod, and then – he knows he’s flushing when he looks up at her again, but he doesn’t even know if she’d be willing to do what he’s about to ask. But it’s not as if he has much choice – if it’s not his cock, then it has to be just one other place, and he’s wearing old, loose breeches that never managed to quite fit even if he gained back enough weight to actually feel somewhat healthy. She wouldn’t need to take them off, in theory.

“I guess – I guess there is. If you want to.”

She stares at him when he doesn’t go on, but when he glances at the oil lamp on the nightstand (why, why can’t he just say it out loud?) her eyes widen in understanding. It’s not as if she – no. Not going there or this is going to end badly.

He expects her to say no at once. Instead she swallows and looks straight at him again. “Are you _sure_? I mean – uh – wouldn’t that be worse?”

He knows exactly what she means.

He shakes his head. “If – if I’m looking at you, it shouldn’t be. And – well. It’s not like he ever bothered with oil.” He shudders at that, knowing that if the mood hadn’t been ruined before, well – this would do it.

But then Jeyne swallows again and lets one of his wrists go. She reaches out for the lamp, puts the cap on the nightstand and then places the lamp over the mattress.

“All right. All right – that’s – that’s fine. Just – you need to tell me what to do. Beyond – beyond the beginning. I think I can manage that.”

She lets out a small chuckle that might have sounded nervous, and he feels a lot less tense at that.

“Can – can we stay like this?” he blurts. He knows it would all go to the seven hells if she was behind him – he needs to see her face – and he doesn’t know how he’d take it if she was on top. Better not risk it.

She nods and leans back on the bed – he’s straddling her now, but it’s not good enough. He leans down so that his head is leaning on her shoulder and spreads his legs slowly. He expects her to get over it as quickly as she can, but he’s wrong. He doesn’t expect her to put a hand on his back, brushing along his spine.

He knows she’s doing it because he’s still tense, and it works – it takes a bit, but he feels his shoulders relaxing and when he raises his head up so that he can kiss her, he figures that maybe the mood wasn’t completely ruined. His cock is half-hard against her thigh now, but he doesn’t even try to search for friction. He’s already putting all of his effort into staying still, he isn’t sure he can do anything else.

He’s almost proud of himself when he doesn’t tense again the moment he feels her hand at his waist. Maybe it’s because her fingers are trembling. He feels her taking a deep breath before putting her fingertip over his entrance and it’s probably a wise thing that she only touches the rim at first. He shudders, but it’s not the bad kind – for one, her fingers are slick and thin and definitely belonging to a woman, and when he nods against her shoulder she takes another breath and slides one finger in, just up until the first knuckle.

“Is – is it –” Jeyne starts, and he nods against her shoulder again.

“Fine. It’s fine. You can – go ahead. Not too much, but – it’s fine.”

And she does, extremely slow, and fuck – he feels heat rush to his face, and it feels – not good yet, but he knows that if he can hold himself together it could get better. He shivers again when Jeyne withdraws her finger before pushing it in again, still slow, obviously trying to see if she’s doing it right, and he could cry for how thankful it makes him feel.

“You can – add another,” he manages to say, and he can barely recognize his voice for how low it is.

“All right,” she says, and she moves her hand away completely. He can’t help feeling strangely empty for the time it takes her to dip her fingers into the oil lamp again, and then her hand is there again and she’s pushing two fingers upwards, still going slow. She’s breathing fast, and on some level he knows that this entire thing is probably freaking her out at least as much as it’s freaking him out.

Maybe they’ll laugh about it, years from now. He kind of hopes that they do.

Then it happens – he hears Jeyne muttering under her breath, something that he can’t quite distinguish, and then she pushes both her slick, thin fingers deeper and that’s it, she hits the spot that she was supposed to and before he knows it, he’s arching up, a deep moan coming from his mouth, and – fuck, he had trained himself to keep his mouth shut _before_ , and he’d be shocked if his entire body wasn’t feeling on fire right now.

“What – did I do something wrong?” Jeyne asks, stalling, and of course she would – until now he’s barely spoken.

“No – no, the – all the contrary,” he blurts. “There – that was – the entire point.” He doesn’t even know if he’s making sense or not, and when he looks at her – well, she doesn’t look entirely convinced, but then she takes another breath and moves her fingers back and then forward and – 

Before his brain can stop the flow of words leaving his mouth, he’s begging her to go faster, to touch him there again, just _right there_ , and to her credit Jeyne does exactly what he’s asking for. She becomes a bit bolder, a bit faster, even if it’s obvious that she barely knows what she’s doing.

Maybe that’s what is setting him over the edge. He doesn’t know. What he knows is that he’s hard now, and he’s searching for friction against her leg while she keeps on bending her fingers inside him just the right way, her other hand buried in the hair at the back of his head, and if he wasn’t feeling pleasure wash all over him he’d feel that her fingers are trembling. But he can’t, not when his blood is boiling and everything feels so good when he thought it never would again, and then Jeyne moves her fingers back and shoves them in in a single motion, burying them as deep as they’ll go, and – before he can even warn her, he’s shaking all over, coming harder than he can remember ever doing, and he falls on top of her because he’s nowhere strong enough to hold himself up – not that he has the presence of mind to even think about it. By that point, he can’t think about anything that isn’t how _good_ it feels, and so he closes his eyes and lets the feeling wash all over him.

He doesn’t know if he opens his eyes ten seconds later or ten minutes, but when he does, he realizes that he’s sprawled on top of Jeyne, that his breeches are probably ruined for good and that she still has a hand carding through his hair.

He attempts to move, he really shouldn’t do this, but Jeyne’s other arm is around his shoulders and she doesn’t let him.

“Well,” she says a moment later, “that – I’m not even sure what I just did.”

“It didn’t look like that,” he tries to joke, but it doesn’t come out exactly like he wanted. “It was – well, you couldn’t have done it better.”

“I noticed,” she answers, and he doesn’t know if he’s imagining a certain smugness in the way she said it, but even if he wasn’t – well, she has all the rights to it.

Neither of them says anything else for the next handful of minutes, and it’s nice, it’s the kind of silence that isn’t awkward or feels heavy, but then he’s starting to be seriously uncomfortable and he needs to get rid of the breeches.

“I’ll – I’ll just go change these. Do you want me to get you some clothes?”

Jeyne shakes her head and says she’ll be waiting. He grabs a clean pair of breeches from the closet and goes to the kitchen. There are some five pitchers full of water in there, but he’s always careful to have it available. He doesn’t like to go without washing for too long. Or not to have water available when he feels like cleaning his hands. He grabs a rag and cleans himself up after taking off the ruined breeches, and then he pulls on the new pair before going back to the bedroom. He can barely feel his feet hurting as he walks.

He lies back down on the free side of the bed, and Jeyne doesn’t waste time before rolling over towards him. One of her ankles hooks around his, her hand goes to his neck and he tries not to say something stupid.

“So,” she starts. “It – it seems to me that all things considered… it went more than good, didn’t it?”

“All things considered, yes. Except for – well. I’m sorry that you ever thought –”

“Don’t even try to start blaming yourself for it.”

He doesn’t even try to finish the sentence. “Fine. Just – I don’t – you saw it. Are you really sure that –”

He doesn’t expect her to cut him short by kissing him before he can finish that sentence, either. And maybe he’s too weak to move away (he should, he really should, she still deserves better) but the moment she does it, he goes along, kissing her back slowly until she moves away, but it’s just mere inches.

“Why can’t you just accept that I am?” she asks, sounding half-resigned and half-amused.

“Jeyne, damn it, you could – you could do better than being stranded with me here. You’re still – I’m never going to be the person I was before. I’m sure that if you tried you’d find someone better. And less – well. You heard me before.”

“I might,” she concedes, “but I’m not interested in someone better. You don’t get it. I’ve met supposedly better men than you, and you know what happened to me before I even arrived at Winterfell. And I don’t really believe that when they said I was Arya, everyone fell for it. No one could say that I wasn’t, but I’m sure that enough people had guessed it. Did anyone try to do something about it?” She shakes her head before clearing her throat. “And out of the people who were supposed to get me out of there, I don’t remember anyone caring much about whether I was fine or not. Except for you. When you were the only one out of them who should have been pushing me. I had years to think about it, you know? You didn’t have to help them. You didn’t owe me a thing. We barely spoke to each other back then. And – you were a lot worse off than I was. But you did it anyway, and you risked your life to save me, and – no, I can’t do better than you. Because if I put any man I’d possibly know up to you, then they’d lose.”

She’s looking down at the quilt as she says it, and Theon doesn’t even know what to answer. He isn’t – he doesn’t have words for that, and he isn’t sure that he would have had them even years ago, and so he does the only thing he can think of – he puts an arm around her, bringing her back against his chest, burying his face in her hair.

“So,” he says then, trying not to sound as if he’s about to break down and cry in gratefulness, “maybe we should try again some time? Without the part where I completely ruin the mood.”

She snorts, her hand reaching for his left one, five fingers easily covering three.

“Well, all things considered, I’d say it went good even taking that into account. And why are you even asking?”

He doesn’t tell her that when he said yes, he thought it’d end up being a one-time thing.

She really doesn’t need to know that, also because he changed his mind.

And as her fingers wrap around his while his ankle hooks around hers, he can only think that he had been an idiot for not having told her yes the first time she asked.

End.


End file.
